Monday, 19 October 2009

Bang bang bang our own drum

What a nice surprise to be sifting through the mail on a Monday morning and find a client has not only written to express their gratitude for all your hard work (as in a proper letter, not an email) but also made sure that the postman knows that they think you are wonderful.

Thursday, 6 August 2009

The craft of copywriting


Who says the craft of copywriting is dead?

Tuesday, 28 July 2009

What you might have heard if you'd been walking past the office this afternoon


Pigs&Bees (eating a packet of Swizzels Matlow Fizzers):
Call me pedantic but it says on this wrapper, no artificial colours. Surely that should be 'no artificial colouring agents' or 'no artifical colourants'.

Scoth Eggs:
Yes.

Pigs&Bees:
Yes, it should be 'no artificial colouring agents'?

Scotch Eggs:
No, yes it's pedantic. But I see what you mean. Colours are naturally occurring. Perhaps it should be 'no artificial pigments'?

Pigs&Bees:
Colours aren't naturally occurring though when you think abut it. They're abstract constructs. You know, a way to label something intangible. They're the label we attach to the perception that arises from our senses and, if you subscribe to a constructivist theory of perception, its integration with stored knowledge. So all colours are artificial in that we construct them.

Scotch Eggs:
But if artificial colours exist that would imply a naturally occurring variant of the same thing. So the packet might be correct.

Pigs&Bees:
Yes.

It's raining again.

Scoth Eggs:
It'll do the lettuces good.

Friday, 19 June 2009

Hoorah!

We've been appointed to Business Link Yorkshire's roster of agencies to provide support to Business Link themselves (we were already on their preferred supplier list).

Hoorah!

Wednesday, 17 June 2009

Another crazy floor



The flat floor tiles of Basilica of St. John Lateran. You wouldn't want that floor in your local ale house.


Picture by Tino Warinowski

better than our famous stripy floor




Learn more about how it's done here.

Tuesday, 19 May 2009

Investment tip

Buy cattle and buy shares in Wahl. In the future everyone wears a full length leather coat and shaves their head.

Thursday, 16 April 2009

Curious

If you are stood at the top of a stairway and give way to someone at the bottom they will run (at least for the first couple of steps) up the stairs. If you are stood at the bottom of a stairway and give way to someone at the top, they will walk down at a constant (normal) speed. Why?





Thursday, 9 April 2009

Wednesday, 8 April 2009

Charlie Brooker's 10 biggest cocks in advertising

If you're easily offended don't watch this:




Question of the day

Who invented chips?

I'd like to shake their hand.

Monday, 6 April 2009

Question of the Day

Is loose leaf tea worth the extra effort?

Thursday, 2 April 2009

Andy Gallacher photographer







To view more of Andy's work check out his new website.

question of the day


Can you still win if you've got nothing to lose?

Wednesday, 1 April 2009

question of the day

Why is there something, rather than nothing?

Tuesday, 24 March 2009

Get me up on my Social-Networking Soapbox



Social-Networking is the new black, it seems. Everyone's on there somewhere, Myface, Bebook, Twitface - the world is online, merrily conversing with one another, uploading their drunken photos, twittering their ...whatever it is you twitter.

I'm a victim too, I'll admit it. I use the thing for swapping my drunken photos, organising gigs, and keeping in touch with people I haven't seen for years and was more than happy to never see again until facebook came along. One thing troubles me though, and that's those self righteous 'facebook campaigners' who bombard you with requests to join groups, with the aim of petitioning this, that, or the other. It now seems that if something in the world bothers you, you don't march on London with a placard, or write a strongly worded letter to The Times or to your local MP. What you do is start a facebook group. Because everyone knows the real social injustices in the world can be ironed out by a poorly conceived petition with an ill-informed mission statement written in something that could almost pass for English if you added the punctuation and all the vowels back in, and truncated the smattering of smiley faces and words spelled phonetically from numbers.

Here follows a few brief examples of groups I've recently had requests to join, together with a few choice words of my own on the subject:

"Oooh no! they've changed facebook, I don't like it! Mummy, make it stop! I'm gonna start a group petitioning against it and they'll bring the old one back if enough people join!"

Right... how about this; if you don't like facebook, stop bloody using it. It's free. It's not compulsory. If they suddenly painted the inside of your local supermarket a slightly different colour would you climb up onto your high horse and get a petition going to change it back because you liked Magnolia better than Arctic White and you couldn't find your favourite brand of baked beans against a slightly different coloured background? No you wouldn't, so shut up.

---

"I say, what's happening in Zimbabwe is an outrage! If we all get together and form a Facebook group, maybe Robert Mugabe will change his mind and stop persecuting his people and decimating his country"

Of course he would. Because Mugabe is going to really lose sleep over the fact that a bunch of middle-class wannabe do-gooders have got together and signed their names on an obscure campaign list lurking somewhere in a sprawling social-networking site, deep within the bowels of the internet. A list that is directed specifically at... no-one, other than those individuals that make up its numbers, as a method of asserting their self-righteousness. Oh and I'm sure the fact that said middle-class 'campaigners' come from the former colonial power that stole his country in the first place and raped it of its mineral resources before finally being persuaded to give it back is going to throw some extra weight behind the argument.

If you want to make a difference, give to charity, lobby your MP, write to those in power, use your power as a consumer of global goods to lodge your opinion. Don't join a bloody pointless facebook group.

---

"Paying for a TV license in this country is obscene - it's £120 a year just to watch telly! I'm putting a stop to this right now with this facebook group!"

Okay. Have you seen any foreign TV recently? Any American channels where the program you're trying to watch is played in brief breaks between the endless, shitty adverts? Any dodgy, low budget European channels full of garish colour and the cheapest presenters scraped up from the nearest dole queue to some obscure stage school? Have you seen ITV for god's sake? Or the plethora of rubbish digital channels available on freeview where you spend an afternoon flipping through what's on offer and find nothing even remotely interesting to watch? Every so often on said digital channels you'll come across a hidden gem. And chances are its been made by the BBC, and bought in to give said channel just a little bit of gravitas in its otherwise dreary representation of what they think the British Television Viewing Public want to see. The BBC is an organisation to make the world envious. Its output is professional, (mostly) superbly high quality, and is not littered with adverts every 10 minutes. They have at least 8 TV channels delivering this content, which you pay for with your 120 quid. On top of this they broadcast at least 7 national radio stations and countless local stations absolutely free. They are also custodians of what I believe is one of the most comprehensive and informative sites on the internet, which even gives you the ability to re-watch or listen again to pretty much all of their broadcast TV and radio content for a week.

A tenner a month for all that? If you ask me that's pretty bloody cheap. Stop whinging.

---

"I want to eat shit even more conveniently, so I want McDonalds to deliver to my door. If we get enough people to join this group they will"

McDonalds have no interest in you apart from turning your finances into their own fat profits by the cunning method of repackaging chemically-infested arse-ends of the commercial factory farmed food industry into garishly coloured cartons and flogging it to little kids by bribing them with cheap plastic toys. If you really want to eat this homogeneous, tasteless, nutritionless rubbish, the least you can do is get off your arse and burn a few calories going to get it. To be honest, I very much doubt it'll improve the flavour much having half an hour of transit time added into the recipe, even if McDonalds would instigate such a service based upon a few people who've signed up to a measly facebook group. Which they won't.

It used to be a practical joke to leave a paper bag full of shit on someone's doorstep. Now it seems people are willing to pay for the privilege.

---

"RIP Jade Goody, your untimely passing has left a gaping-unrepairable hole in my life, and I just had to start this facebook group to cope with it"

At risk of sounding cruel and heartless, what is going on here? Yes, it's very sad that a young woman has been struck down by a hideous degenerative disease, and has, in the prime of her life, lost the battle and left her husband and two kids to fend for themselves in the world. But can we please have some perspective? According to Cancer Research, 2,800 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer in Britain every year. Wikipedia, unfortunately had no figures for Britain, but gives an estimate that in America in 2008, 3,870 women were killed as a result of the disease. Where are their tributes? I'll be willing to bet that the vast majority of their kids don't have four and a half million in the bank to help them get started in life. Although little Bobby and Freddie may have to periodically part with chunks of cash in order to keep paying their Dad's bail every time he beats someone up, it's still a pretty good start.

Jade Goody, was famous for the sake of being famous. She made her millions by selling her soul to cheap television and women's glossy weeklies. Perhaps you feel some kind of collective responsibility for her because you bought the mags, watched the crap TV programmes, and by robbing her of every scrap of her private life, propelled her from being a lowly, semi-literate dental nurse into being a semi-literate z-list celebrity millionaire. Oh yes, you've also conveniently forgotten that only a year ago you hated her with every sinew in your hypocritical body for acting like an ignorant racist cow on national television. Or rather, you hated her because the aforementioned tabloid media told you to, because just as they made a shedload of cash from propelling her to stardom, they were more than willing to make another shedload from dragging her down again, albeit as a result of her own, ignorant comments.

It's a sad case of affairs that the bizarre, celebrity-obsessed so-called culture we perpetrate in this country should now stoop to the level that Jade's last public act was to sell her death-story to OK! magazine, in order for them to publish a macabre pre-death obituary and make another shedload of money from her passing.

Today, in Iraq, 25 innocent people attending a funeral and mourning the loss of a loved one were killed by a suicide bomber. An agonising death, women, children, ripped apart by red hot shrapnel. Countless more were injured. Do they have a facebook group to mourn their loss? No, because frankly, no-one's making a fat pile of cash out of their lives. Nobody can sell thousands of crappy womens' glossy weeklies by cashing in on the gory details of their untimely death.

If you want to mourn Jade, go and buy OK! magazine, read her inflated story, give a little bit of cash to her kids and her jailbird husband to add to their millions. And by doing so, give more cash to her fat-cat publicist, Max Clifford, and the media barons of the cut-throat tabloid press who propelled her to fame in the first instance. A life lost. They don't care, it boosts the circulation figures.

If you want to pay a real tribute, give your money to Cancer Research instead. They'll actually put it towards preventing many, many more women suffering silently at the hands of cancer. But you don't need a facebook group to do that, you just need some common sense and a sense of perspective.

---

Seeing as how this is a subject I evidently feel passionately about, I felt the need to create my own facebook group to further my cause, albeit with a certain sense of irony. It's simply called Stop asking me to join pointless bloody facebook groups and you can join simply by clicking on the link.

Tuesday, 3 March 2009

Great news! (But you'll have to look hard to find it)


Here's the rather pessimistic headlines from Yahoo! this afternoon:

Winter weather due to hit parts of Britain again

Jade Goody's husband found guilty of assault

Kids' presenter accused of swearing on live TV


The BBC have a much more balanced view of the world. They draw our attention to misery the world over with:

Hunt for Lahore cricket attackers

Man convicted of killing toddler

Murder police charged with perjury

Northern Rock makes £1.4 billion loss


And of course the good old Daily Mail:

World to end sooner than thought - it's the immigrants who are to blame

Ok, I made that last one up. But the others are true. Well they can't choose the news, you might say. And I would agree. But they can choose how to report it. Many years ago I was told the difference between a reporter and a journalist was that the reporter gave the facts while a journalist gave an opinion backed up by facts. It seems these days the only opinion is that we are all doomed. Now, being raised on a diet of Samuel Beckett I've long ago come to terms with the futility of life. However, rather than wallow in my ontological despair I would much rather focus on the good things in life. I'm not one of those delusional optimists whose legs you could chop off and they'd say how grateful they are because they've always wanted to be able to park closer to the entrance at B&Q but at the same time I don't expect the worst.

So what has this got to do with anything? Well I can't help thinking that given all the doom and gloom in the world a little bit of light relief can be a real competitive advantage to any business at the moment. Do you really want to spend your limited cash with someone who can't muster the enthusiasm to offer a polite greeting when you phone them up with an enquiry? Even the banks (spit) have twigged that talking to their customers like human beings is a way to get their attention and maybe even buy one of their products. It happened in the local branch this morning. A pleasant exchange rather the usual robot like stamping of deposit slips and I'm happily getting an insurance quotation. I've received no end of direct mail from the same bank. Did any of it work? No. But a pleasant few words did.

Try it. Even if you don't get a sale at least you'll feel better for taking your mind off the doom and gloom headlines for a few minutes.

Monday, 9 February 2009

Strange things to do when the kids are in bed

Create your own alien invasion in the dining room using their Ben 10 aliens, a slate place matt, and a bike light.





Tuesday, 3 February 2009

I remember now...

Like one of those smug cabriolet drivers who get to rub it in our faces for a couple of sunny days a year, the drive to PBHQ this morning reminded me why I suffer 21MPG on a good day, silly insurance, and am single handedly supporting the brake disc industry by driving a Subaru Impreza. This was the view from behind the wheel:


Wednesday, 21 January 2009

food for thought

Watching history being made and hearing Barack Obama say how 60 years ago his father may not have been served in a local restaurant I wondered if a country whose Presidential Oath ends with the words 'so help me God' will ever elect an atheist.

On the subject of America, I saw Dan Gilbert (of what makes people happy fame) talking about the USA's reaction to 9/11. America's borders have never been more heavily guarded yet, in the 12 months following 9/11, twice as many people as were killed in the twin towers perished in road accidents due to the increased traffic caused by a fear of flying. America was guarding the door while the boogie man was already in the house.

We've grown complacent about people dying on the roads. Nutters flying plane loads of people into a tower block was something we never imagined would happen. Cancer is the same story. 1 in 3 of us will get cancer, so the stats tell us. So where's the war on cancer to rival the war on terror? It doesn't exist. Cancer is a fact of life. 3 out of 4 grandparents. My father-in-law. And statistically at least one of me, the wife, or our two kids will get it.

I put this ad together using clips from YouTube. Post your opinions below.



Wednesday, 7 January 2009

We won!

Not the usual ranting and drivel that we post here but...just before Christmas we won the brief to rebrand Pennine Yorkshire on behalf of West Yorkshire Tourism Partnership . Over 100 agencies expressed an interest and 61 submitted work. We won.

We're right chuffed.